Re: CL functions called at runtime

["Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com>]

Burton Samograd <burton@samograd.ca> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I seemed to have missed the dicussion about the warnings being generated
> by the byte compiler about CL functions being called at runtime.  Now
> I'm seeing them in my code for useful functions like remove-if.
>
> Could someone explain why these warnings are being generated?

That's because the functions defined in the file cl.el (and associated
files) are not deemed "pure" emacs lisp enough.  (Is the actual reason
because RMS doesn't like Common Lisp, or because they represent a layer
above emacs lisp and therefore may be slower than native emacs lisp
functions?  Some other reason I don't know?)  It is accepted that they
are used at macro expansion time, in emacs code distributed by the FSF,
but the FSF doesn't want to distribute emacs code that depend on them at
run-time.


Notice however that if you don't have the intention to have your code
integrated with the GNU emacs distribution, then this warning is totally
irrelevant: you can make your code dependant on cl.el as you can make it
dependent on any other emacs package, coming from the FSF or from any
third party.


I have this in my ~/.emacs to disable those warnings:

(require 'bytecomp)
(byte-compile-disable-warning 'cl-functions)


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.